The Great Recession Blog

A cold reality has been blowing into the U.S. since last winter, and it has nothing to do with snow. During a balmy spring one year ago when people were feeling cozy about economic recovery, I said that economic headwinds would build over the summer until they dominated the economy by fall, ending all hopes of recovery.   […]

When you look at numerous key sectors of the economy, they hang together like the bones of a rickety skeleton. Here is a list in bullet points of some economic bones to pick over. When viewed altogether, they indicate the next dip of the Great Recession is likely near and severe:   “There are more obvious light switches today or […]

Russia and China started backing out of U.S. bonds as a from of reserve currency shortly after the Great Recession began. This year I predicted that the conflict between the U.S. and Russia over Crimea would lead to Russia taking a much more aggressive role in offloading the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The Crimean conflict would become significant […]

My “Economic Forecast 2014” starts with Russia. The first breezes of coming turbulence are already blowing in on the U.S. as a storm I’ll name “the Russian Rampage” hits Crimea and Russia braces for the the U.S. response. Foreign-owned U.S. bonds held in custody of the Federal Reserve took their largest drop on record last […]

The news of the week centered on Europe where no one knows how to clean up the Greece stain that smears the euro image. Greece ironically elected Nazis to fight German austerity last week. France joined in the fight with a hard left-wing punch to Sarkozy, knocking him flat on his French derriere and replacing him with […]

A year ago, the news was full of articles about China trying to slow down its growth to align its speed with that of the rest of the world and to keep inflation in check. Now, everywhere in the press you read concerns about China’s slowdown. How fickle can the press and market investors be? […]

“Everybody has an opinion about trade with China, and here is mine: let’s trade ‘em Ben Bernanke for Fu Ying [China’s Vice Foreign Minister]. Throw in a minor league pitcher if we have to – President Obama comes immediately to mind.” (The following is a guest editorial from Tim Nerenz, traveling in China on business)   […]

Europe is looking at solving the European debt crisis by creating more debt, which has been the U.S. master plan all along. “European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi told euro zone governments on Friday to act fast to get their rescue fund up and running, expressing exasperation at their lack of progress in response to […]

On Jan 19, 2011,  Stan wrote: A strange statement from [a writer I just read]:  “China needs to bring more jobs to the United States…….” ….Who ???   And this is even stranger ? “Until China figures out a way to link itself to the idea of job creation . . . you are always going to […]

American International Group has received to date $170,000,000,000 of U.S. tax-payer’s money. The zeroes start swimming in my vision with numbers like that, as my eyes cannot focus on numbers so wide. If the numerals were letters, that’d be enough letters for three four-letter words. Don’t know why I think of four-letter words in the […]

The fickleness of the stock market as a predictor of the economy versus just a responder to the economy played out clearly in the past week. On March 5th, CNN reported that the market had broken a five-day losing streak, bouncing off of twelve-year lows. “The markets opened higher and never looked back, following reports […]